A new messaging service is billed as “the world's strongest anonymous chat” in pre-alpha.
DarkIRC was created as a “brutal censorship of crypto devs by authoritarian governments,” developer Amir Taki said on Twitter.
The chat service is designed to allow users to communicate anonymously. Unlike traditional messaging platforms that require user registration or generate persistent accounts, DarkIRC allows users to change their nicknames at any time.
Takei continued, “A free society means free speech. “That means all talk. Without limits.”
DarkIRC is designed to allow users to communicate anonymously. Unlike traditional messaging platforms that require user registration or generate persistent accounts, DarkIRC allows users to change their nicknames at any time.
Transmitted messages are not linked to any persistent identity, allowing for plausible deniability that any message could have been sent by a single user during investigation.
“War on Privacy”.
The tacky software was created in response to “attacks” on developers working on “freedom technology” such as crypto mixer Tornado Cash.
“The power regime puts devs working on free technology in jail,” says a DarkIRC developer, “we're under attack. Devs are pushed into secret places with their backs against the wall.”
In the year The developers of Tornado Cash, a coin-mixer approved by the US Treasury in 2022, pointed to the case of Roman Hurricane and Alexey Persev.
Percev was convicted of money laundering in a Dutch court in May this year and sentenced to 64 months in prison. Storm has been accused of money laundering in the US, and last month a US district judge ruled that the case could continue in court in the Southern District of New York.
Takei tweeted, “During the Tornado Cash case, prosecutors found their internal conversations on signal. The court said, “You said so” and put the Devis in jail. Decrypt has reached out to the messaging app Signal and will update this story if you respond.
Tornado Cash is a hybrid of decentralized and trustless, which means developers deploy it without any control over who uses it and how. Imprisoning developers for misusing other unregulated software has drawn attention from privacy advocates, and those who say it threatens free speech.
Rachel Rose O'Leary, developer of DarkFi, the organization behind DarkIRC, says that while the group maintains that there are anonymous collaboration methods, the identities of some group members like her are not secret. “We know it's an accident, it's calculated,” she said.
“There's a war on privacy and there's a war on privacy developers,” O'Leary said.
Telegram
Taki highlighted recent changes to messaging app Telegram's privacy policies, saying, “The EU forced Telegram to hand over all chat data to them.” This is the new normal. “
In September, after CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France, Telegram adjusted its privacy settings to allow it to share more information with government officials. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced that the app will disclose the IP addresses and phone numbers of suspected criminals when it receives a valid court order from the relevant judicial authorities.
These policy adjustments have sparked debates over balancing user privacy and security, with critics arguing that Telegram's expanded data-sharing capabilities could lead to increased surveillance and reduced user anonymity.
Is Tor broken?
DarkIRC's peer-to-peer IRC implementation allows the use of the Tor network to further enhance anonymity, making it difficult for third parties to trace communications back to individual users. The platform includes anti-spam and anti-flooding measures, allowing each channel to set its own posting policies and allowing users to enable optional moderation.
According to recent reports, Tor has been compromised, with German law enforcement able to identify users of the messaging platform operating on the network. By conducting extensive and long-term monitoring of Tor nodes in data centers, investigators correlated timing patterns of traffic entering and exiting the Tor network.
The method employed by the German police does not work when the user interacts with onion sites. Those services run entirely within the Tor network and do not require the use of exit nodes.
After investigating the Tor Foundation's claims, the anonymous user hired the outdated instant messaging software Ricochet. The outdated version is useful because it doesn't use Vanguards-lite or the Vanguards add-on – both of which prevent this type of attack.
As a result, both an investigation of Tor and an independent report later published by the cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes stated that Tor “is still safe to use.”
However, O'Leary highlighted that the DarkIRC development team plans to add more network-level anonymity solutions such as NIM, a privacy-preserving MixNet zero-knowledge (ZK) authentication.
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